Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture
Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences
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Table of Contents • Notables • On Top of the Hill Vision Credits
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Wall Street Journal Says UA Blackberries Part of ‘Sweet’ Marketing Trend The U of A Division of Agriculture blackberry-breeding program was featured in a Wall Street Journal article by Katy McLaughlin (June 3, page P5) about a trend in the fruit industry toward increased marketing of patented varieties that are branded as sweeter than other varieties. The article provides details about Dr. John Clark’s blackberry breeding program, which was started by Dr. James N. Moore in 1964. McLaughlin writes that, “For the past 26 years, (Clark) has been painstakingly hand-pollinating blackberry flowers and making cross-breeds that produce more and firmer fruit, have no thorns -- and have a lot more sugar.” “Mr. Clark's berries are part of a sugar rush that is hitting the produce aisles. This week, stores began stocking the Kandy Primo, a new variety of cantaloupe with dark orange flesh that reflects its higher sugar content. Sales of Sunkist's Cara Cara orange, a sweeter, lower-acid pink variety, have tripled since it was introduced in 2004. Several companies and associations are mass-marketing relatively new sweet apples, such as the Jazz or Pink Lady, that stay as crisp as tart varieties tend to do. And in the past five years, companies like Family Tree Farms and Dulcinea have rolled out sweeter plums, nectarines, peaches, watermelons and honeydews. “These fruits are bred to have higher levels of sugar and lower levels of acid, the element that gives fruit its tanginess. That is good news for fruit eaters with a sweet tooth,” McLaughlin writes. The Arkansas blackberry varieties of Navaho, Ouachita and Arapaho are marketed by SunnyRidge Farm, Inc., of Winter Haven, Fla., in a “SunnyRidge Super Sweet” marketing campaign started in 2005. SunnyRidge president Keith Mixon said, “Four or five years ago, we began focusing on developing markets for blackberries from the southeastern states. California berries dominated the markets, but our berries are sweet, where theirs are more bitter. The campaign proved successful last year, and it looks like it will do even better this year.” Sweetness is key to the success of any fruit, Clark said. “Everyone likes sweetness in fruit.” Beyond sweetness, variety in flavor comes from other components, including what Clark calls “aromatics.” These provide subtle differences in taste, and are particularly important in grapes and peaches, he said. Texture, such as crispness in table grapes, is also important. Other important traits sought during the breeding process are reliable production and ability to be stored and shipped. “We’re trying to reach a broad audience from growers and shippers to consumers,” Clark said. McLaughlin writes in the Wall Street Journal that “some observers say that this is the latest example of catering to mass-market tastes, the same impetus that led the pork industry to breed super-lean pigs -- and cooks everywhere to produce dry pork chops. These critics say character and complexity are systematically being bred out of fruit. ‘You might as well dip a piece of balsa wood in some syrup,’ says Andy Mariani, a Morgan Hill, Calif., grower of mostly older breeds of stone fruits, like peaches and nectarines.” The WSJ article says the branding trend is reshaping the $31.5 billion U.S. fruit industry. “In the past, new varieties were usually developed by universities and made available for anyone to grow for free. Now private companies are investing millions of dollars into developing new varieties, then patenting or trademarking their inventions and marketing them globally, just like soft drinks and potato chips. The nurseries that are raising the blackberry plants developed by Mr. Clark, for example, are paying the University of Arkansas royalties for each plant. “Patents given to fruit varieties between 1994 and 2004 increased by nearly 37%, compared with the prior decade, according to Jennifer Drew and Philip Pardey, researchers in the applied economics department of the University of Minnesota. The goal of the corporate R&D: to create and market fruit tasty enough to compete with a widening category of health-oriented snack foods, from energy bars to smoothies, for which consumers will pay more. “A case in point: the Grapple (pronounced GRAY-pul), a regular Fuji apple dipped in an artificial Concord-grape flavoring, which was introduced two years ago. Nearly 200,000 Grapples at about $1.30 each fly off supermarket shelves a week, according to Grapple marketer Get Fit Foods. Skip Johnson, the company's co-owner, says, "This is about the only apple that gets fan mail" -- around 30 emails a day, he says, from the parents of the little kids who are its biggest fans.” “When we tasted the Grapple,” McLaughlin writes, “we found the artificial-grape flavor overwhelming -- by far the sweetest-tasting of the new varieties we sampled. But the melons, too, were very sugary, even when they seemed too hard to be fully ripe. (The companies say our samples were air-shipped by growers and didn't mature in the warehouse as most commercial fruit does.) Our favorites were the Cara Cara oranges, which were both tasty and juicy at the height of the season, and the sweet yet refreshingly crisp Jazz apples.” Brand loyalty among specific categories of consumers is the goal of marketing any branded product, and fruit is no exception. McLaughlin writes that, “The recent changes in the fruit industry ‘ought to be spectacular for the consumer,’ says Steve Lutz, executive vice president of the Perishables Group, a Chicago-based consultant to the fresh-food industry, because they will expand choices. This year, large supermarkets will have a projected average of 650 produce items, up from 343 in 1994, according to the Produce Marketing Association, a trade group in Newark, Del. “Companies are focusing on sweeter fruit for the oldest reason in the book: It sells. ‘We're basically selling sugar,’ says Ray Gerawan, director of marketing at stone-fruit grower Gerawan Farming in Reedley, Calif. “While sweeter varieties of fruit can have slightly more calories and sugar, they also have high levels of vitamins, minerals and fiber, so nutritionists aren't worried. ‘If you have a tool to get people to find fruit more delicious, that's exciting to me,’ says dietician Dawn Jackson Blatner, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “But sweeter fruit does pose challenges for chefs like Bill Yosses, a New York pastry chef most recently at Josephs at Citarella. He says that since golden pineapples have nearly replaced the traditional varieties -- a process that began in the mid-1990s -- he's often had to blend varieties of pineapple to get a balanced flavor. ‘In all kinds of fruit,’ he says, ‘if it's all sugar and no balance and no interesting aroma and flavor, that's a problem.’” The Wall Street Journal article says that, “The companies behind these new, sweeter fruits are quick to point out that the breeders, like Mr. Clark, use traditional techniques, not genetic engineering.” McLaughlin writes that, “Many companies are afraid consumers will confuse the techniques they use -- largely, the hand pollination and grafting that have been used for about 100 years -- with genetic engineering, which has sparked controversy, particularly in Europe. But companies are using other advances in genetic science to create new breeds. Both HortResearch and Seminis, the world's biggest produce-seed company, which was recently acquired by Monsanto, are using molecular markers to speed up the process of creating new varieties of fruit and vegetables. “In recent years, scientists have begun experimenting with transgenic breeding, or genetic engineering, which involves isolating genes from other organisms -- plants, animals or bacteria -- and using laboratory techniques to introduce these genes into a plant. Eventually, that could mean more disease-resistant, profitable and, perhaps, even sweeter fruit.”
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